Mobile terminals have become more and more important in society as a tool as well as a showcase for people all around the world. One of the more important aspects in current mobile phone design is the ability to personalise one's own phone with changeable covers, different stickers, etc. Users wish to control the image projected to other people by their possessions and this includes mobile phone terminals. This trend of mobile phone personalisation is extending into the actual software design of mobile terminals. Colour displays and programmable menus (with third party application add-ons) will lead to many more ways of customising the “look and feel” of the user interface and desktop by the end user.
History has proved that technical innovations which are targeted either to technically skilled end users or marginal groups of users will not manage to succeed in the long run. The same is true with the design and user interfaces, one of the most important factors in mobile terminals.
Current mobile terminals have so-called profiles, these are collections of user settings or preferences that the end user can automatically manage together. Such settings are, for example, ringing tone, volume of tone or maybe the silent mode of the phone. In the future profiles will become more situation dependent, for example by integrating the whereabouts of the end user.
Current mobile terminals also have end user managed “groups” which can be used to collect different people together into one entity. This group may then have a unique ringing tone or icon which is displayed when someone from the group calls.
Profiles and subscriber groups are currently managed by the end user by a local user interface of the mobile terminal. The current system of profiles is very limiting. There exists only profiles which the end user can customise locally or download from Club Nokia-like websites. These profiles are very inflexible by nature (silent, general, etc) and only a small number of features are customable. It is not possible at present to customise existing profiles based on on-going events as described in this invention.
Customising mobile terminals is very popular, and there has been a large take-up of the limited amount of customisation which is available at present.
It is an object of the present invention to provide for mobile terminals to be further customised by the provision of improved profile information.